Nature, Published online: 12 August 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-02429-6
A retrospective look at ‘para-tonnerres’ in eighteenth-century Paris, and Paul Nurse’s debut Nature paper, in our weekly dip into the journal’s archive.
Category: 1. Edi-Choice
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How Paris dealt with lightning in the Age of Enlightenment
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Organs on chips could make biomedical research more equitable
Organ-on-a-chip technology, which uses microfluidic systems to culture cells in ways that mimic human physiology, could help to reduce scientists’ dependence on animal models (see Nature https://doi.org/pxb3; 2025). There’s another benefit too:…
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Trump’s chief science adviser faces a storm of criticism: what’s next?
The election of US President Donald Trump last year triggered widespread concern in the US scientific community, but some researchers saw a glimmer of hope in the form of Michael Kratsios — the president’s chief science adviser. Scientists…
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Impact of catastrophic flood might have been exacerbated by river-management programme
Nature, Published online: 12 August 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-02354-8
Efforts to engineer a river to reduce flood risk might have unintentionally contributed to severe erosion of the riverbed, worsening the impact of the flood.
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cognitive scientist who explored how machines might emulate human imagination
Credit: Gary Doak/eyevine
Margaret Ann Boden, one of the last surviving members of the first generation of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, has died at 89. She was the sort of polymath that many AI scientists long thought essential to…
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Catalytic enantioselective synthesis of alkylidenecyclopropanes
The enantioselective construction of small ring carbocycles provides organic chemists with an enduring challenge.1 Despite their commercial importance, enantioselective synthetic routes towards alkylidenecyclopropanes (ACPs), a class of small…
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4,000 of Them Have Left, Erasing Decades of Spaceflight Know-How
NASA is facing one of the largest workforce shakeups in its history, with nearly 4,000 employees — about one-fifth of its civil service staff — choosing to leave through voluntary buyout programs in recent months. The numbers come from…
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Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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A research paper proposes a fully physically realized model for warp drive.
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This builds on an existing model that requires negative energy—an impossibility.
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The new model is exciting, but warp…
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